Senior Software Engineer II – Applied AI

Smartsheet

Senior Software Engineer leading AI platform design and architecture at Smartsheet. Building innovative AI solutions while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Posted 5/4/2026full-timeRemote • Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $192,500 - $245,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSKubernetesNode.jsPythonTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build the AI Platform Foundation: Lead the design and ownership of the core infrastructure that serves as the backbone for all Smartsheet AI experiences. Focus on building a robust, multi-tenant environment that reduces friction for internal teams, allowing them to deploy reliable and scalable AI features with ease.
Standardize the AI Developer Path: Architect high-level abstractions and 'Golden Path' APIs that democratize AI development across Smartsheet. By insulating product teams from infrastructure complexity, you will enable them to ship intelligent features with high velocity while guaranteeing safety and consistency at scale.
Engineer AI Trust & Safety Systems: Establish the mission-critical monitoring and quality assurance layers that protect Smartsheet customers. By creating rigorous evaluation pipelines, you will ensure every AI-driven feature meets the high bar for safety, data privacy, and deterministic performance expected by our enterprise partners.
Drive technical strategy: Partner with principal engineers to define the technical roadmap for Smartsheet’s AI infrastructure, making architectural decisions that will shape how we build with AI for years to come.

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years working directly with LLMs in production
Deep, hands-on experience with prompt engineering and context engineering, you understand how model behavior changes with framing, structure, and input design
Strong working knowledge of RAG architectures: chunking strategies, embedding models, retrieval evaluation, and failure diagnosis
Experience building or extending LLM evaluation frameworks, you have designed scorers, worked with golden datasets, and thought carefully about what good looks like
Strong Python skills; comfortable working in data-heavy environments (Databricks, Delta tables, or equivalent)
Ability to communicate complex quality findings (written and verbal) to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, you can explain what’s broke, why it matters, and what needs to happen next without losing the room
Strong cross-functional judgment, you know when to escalate, when to resolve independently, and how to build credibility across engineering, product, and AI platform teams
A bias for clarity in ambiguous situations, when failure modes are murky and trade-offs are real, you bring structure and a clear point of view rather than waiting for consensus
Strong Plus: Prior work in an Applied AI or LLMOps platform within a product company
Experience with the following: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE): The industry standard for AI. Skills include managing GPU scheduling, auto-scaling based on token throughput, and using tools like Karpenter for cost-efficient node provisioning.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Using Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CDK to provision Vector Databases, SQS queues, and S3 buckets.
Vector Databases: Proficiency in managing and optimizing Pinecone, Milvus, Weaviate, or Databricks Vector Search.
AI Gateways: Building or configuring proxies (like LiteLLM or Kong AI Gateway) to handle rate-limiting, PII masking, and cost-tracking.
LLM Observability: Setting up tracing tools like Langfuse, LangSmith, or MLflow to monitor 'Time to First Token' (TTFT) and trace hallucination issues.
Model-Based Evals: Implementing automated scoring systems (like RAGAS or DeepEval) that use an 'LLM-as-a-Judge' to grade production outputs.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Employer subsidized medical/vision and dental coverage for full-time employees
401k Match to help you save for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay)
Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity
Flexible Time Away Program, plus Sick Time Off
US employees are automatically covered under Smartsheet-sponsored life insurance, short-term, and long-term disability plans
US employees receive 12 paid holidays per year
Up to 24 weeks of Parental Leave
Personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community
Opportunities for professional growth and development including access to Udemy online courses
Company Funded Perks, including a counseling membership, local retail discounts, and your own personal Smartsheet account
Teleworking options from any registered location in the U.S. (role specific)

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

software engineeringprompt engineeringcontext engineeringRAG architecturesLLM evaluation frameworksPythonKubernetesInfrastructure as CodeVector DatabasesModel-Based Evals

Soft Skills

communicationcross-functional judgmentclarity in ambiguous situations